Donald Trump leading in majority of swing states, new poll shows

Republican ahead in four out of seven key places in blow for Kamala Harris

Donald Trump is ahead in the majority of the seven key swing states, a new Telegraph poll shows.
The Republican has increased his support in the four crucial states in the Sun Belt by one point, according to the latest in a series of surveys conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies for The Telegraph.
This has taken him into the lead in Georgia, Nevada, Arizona and North Carolina.
With just over two weeks to go to polling day, the 78-year-old has moved to take the lead in most of the 2024 battlegrounds.
He is neck-and-neck with his Democratic rival Kamala Harris in Michigan and Pennsylvania, both of which Joe Biden won by narrow margins in 2020.
The US vice-president leads Trump in just one of the battlegrounds, Wisconsin, and by a single point, 47 to 46 per cent.
In national polls, Trump and Ms Harris are locked in a dead heat and the presidential race will ultimately come down to the results in a few crucial states where both major parties enjoy similar levels of support among the voting population.
In the past few weeks, the Harris campaign has undertaken a media blitz which included a poorly received Fox news interview and a controversial CBS sit-down, which has embroiled the network in an impartiality row after it edited one of the presidential hopeful’s answers to make it more “succinct”.
In the latest polling for The Telegraph, of 8,533 people, Trump is leading Ms Harris by just a single digit in Georgia and Nevada, where he has the support of 48 per cent of voters and 47 per cent, respectively.
In 2020, Mr Biden claimed Georgia by the smallest of margins — 0.3 per cent — with just 11,779 more votes out of the almost five million ballots cast.
Trump holds a slightly larger, three-point lead over Ms Harris in Arizona, where 49 per cent of voters said they intend to cast their ballot for him, and North Carolina, where 48 per cent said the same.
In all four key states where Trump leads Ms Harris, the former president has increased his support by just one point since the last Redfield & Wilton poll for The Telegraph, on Oct 15.
Trump and Ms Harris are in a dead heat in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Trump is the only Republican to have won Michigan since George HW Bush in 1988, having narrowly beaten Hillary Clinton in the state in 2016. 
Mr Biden’s support had waned in the state, home to the heart of America’s car industry, and packed with blue-collar workers. While Ms Harris has gained some ground since the US president quit the race, the polling for The Telegraph suggests she continues to struggle in a state with a large Arab and Muslim population amid dissatisfaction with the administration’s stance on the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon.
Voters in Michigan trust Trump more on the economy, inflation and immigration — three of their top priorities overall — previous Telegraph polling has found. In the most recent polling, conducted between Oct 16 to 18, voters listed the economy, abortion and immigration as the top issues that will determine how they cast their ballots.
The polling is bad news for Ms Harris, whose hopes of winning the White House rely on strong performances in the Rust Belt battlegrounds of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, all three of which the 60-year-old visited on Monday.
Concern over affordability has emerged as the biggest issue for those casting ballots in the Nov 5 presidential election by quite some distance.
Majorities of voters in every one of the critical states said that, before casting their vote, they would consider whether they were better off today than they were four years ago.
Between 42 per cent and 50 per cent in all seven swing states said their financial situation has worsened in the last year.
An even larger majority, between 54 and 63 per cent, said they had deliberately reduced their spending on groceries as a result of rising costs.
Many voters appeared to blame the Biden-Harris administration, with a plurality of voters saying they did not believe the cost of living would have increased to the same degree if Trump had been in office.
The second most important concern for voters was access to abortion, which has been sharply curtailed since the overturning of Roe v Wade in 2022, followed by immigration.
Out of the three, abortion is the only issue where Ms Harris commands more trust than Trump among voters.
Ms Harris and Trump have embarked on a campaign blitz of the swing states.
The vice-president appears to be focusing her efforts on the Rust Belt and Georgia in the final sprint, while Trump has multiple events planned in North Carolina, Georgia and Nevada this week.
The 78-year-old Republican also plans to stage a major rally at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan on Sunday, claiming he can win the state of New York, a feat no Republican candidate has managed since Reagan in 1984.
While the figures offer Trump a narrow lead in the White House race, Redfield & Wilton caution that in every state polled, the figures are within the margin of error. The four Sun Belt swing states alone are not enough to secure Trump victory, which requires 270 electoral college votes.
The polling also reveals a split further down the ballot, with the parties’ senate candidates in critical states showing popularity levels that contrast with the top ticket names.
In Arizona, for example, where Trump holds a three-point lead over Ms Harris, the Democratic senate candidate Ruben Gallego leads his Republican rival Kari Lake by a far more decisive seven points, 48 to 41 per cent.
The Democratic senate candidates in Michigan and Nevada are similarly outperforming Ms Harris in terms of the margins of their leads.
In Michigan, Elissa Slotkin leads Republican Mike Rogers by seven points, 45 per cent to 38 per cent.
Nevada’s incumbent Democratic senator Jacky Rosen had the support of 48 per cent of respondents while 41 per cent said they intended to vote for her Republican challenger Sam Brown.
In Wisconsin, two-term Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin is locked in a tight race against businessman Eric Hovde, whom she leads by one point, 45 per cent to 44.